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The ‘Soul Sisters’ in the Kitchen

FORT WORTH — DORA CHARLES and Idella Parker, two black Southern cooks, were born nearly a half century apart and likely never met. But if they did, they would be soul sisters.

Ms. Parker, born in 1914, would understand Ms. Charles’s story of cooking for Paula Deen, whose downfall over charges of racism got a little steeper last week, when Ms. Charles detailed her own fraught history with the celebrity chef. She would understand the fabulous food drenched in butter and sugar, the 15-hour days on tired feet, the wages insufficient to pay for health care. She would understand the famous boss with romantic notions of the South and its cuisine.

What Idella Parker might not understand is how conditions could have changed so little since she left the kitchen of her generation’s Paula Deen, the author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, in 1950. Ms. Charles’s and Ms. Deen’s conflicting accounts about their relationship loudly echo the experiences of generations of African-American cooks and their white employers.

Since the arrival of Europeans and Africans in the South in the early 17th century, black women have labored in kitchens controlled by white women, melding foods from three continents into a distinctive regional cuisine. And many of those white women have long taken credit for black women’s work, whether through their acclaimed “Southern” hospitality, their popular books about party hosting or their fortunes made from selling the food cooked by black women in taverns and restaurants.

Ms. Rawlings, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel “The Yearling,” brought New York literati and Hollywood stars to her orange farm to enjoy fine meals of the freshest local ingredients. In 1942, she published “Cross Creek Cookery,” a compendium of her favorite local recipes, like “Utterly Deadly Southern Pecan Pie.” The book made her one of the country’s foremost food celebrities.

Photo

Credit
Eleanor Davis

When she published her memoir a half-century later, Ms. Parker recalled her participation in producing the cookbook. “Many of the recipes in the book were mine, but she only gave me credit for three of them, including ‘Idella’s Biscuits,’ ” she said. “And of course it was me who did most of the cooking when we were trying all the recipes out. All I ever got from the cookbook was an autographed copy, but in those days I was grateful for any little crumb that white people let fall, so I kept my thoughts about the cookbook strictly to myself.”

The pair’s experience was hardly unique. Long before the Food Network, cookbooks showcased the South’s culinary splendors. Black women, whether willingly or not, shared their recipes with white women, who wrote them down for publication and then claimed the credit. While the cooks knew they were sharing something of value, the authors had little regard for their intellectual property. Hundreds of cookbooks appeared with recipes, from collard greens to puff pastry, attributed to “Beppie” or “Aunt Polly” or even “Mammy,” 70 and 80 years after the end of slavery.

Sometimes even that meager credit was withheld. After the white cookbook writer Marion Brown asked a friend for her clam chowder recipe, she wrote: “Mrs. Clinkscales promised that she would let me have it, if she could persuade her Negro cook to give exact proportions. After a long period of waiting, the recipe arrived with the notation, ‘This is as near it as possible.’ ”

Of course, white employers typically believed that their cooks loved them and cooked for them out of that love. When Ms. Deen claimed that she and Ms. Charles were “soul sisters,” she fell squarely into the tradition of declaring an employee to be just like a member of the family.

But black employees, like Ms. Charles, have always realized that the marketplace was squarely at the center of the relationships. They struggled to negotiate favorable hours, wages and working conditions, and turnover was frequent. Some cooks did stay for decades with the same families, as Ms. Charles did with Ms. Deen, but they were the exception rather than the rule. And racism permeated the homes of Southern employers, with the employees segregated into the kitchen with separate eating utensils.

Speaking out against this unequal system takes courage. Ms. Parker left Ms. Rawlings in 1950 and later became active in civil rights, but she held her thoughts about the famous author until she published her memoir in 1992. Ms. Charles has more to lose, going public against a media icon still beloved by many.

That risk, sadly, is something Idella Parker would also understand. And she would grieve to know that life in a Southern kitchen still resembles the one she walked out of more than 60 years ago.

Rebecca Sharpless, an associate professor of history at Texas Christian University, is the author of “Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 30, 2013, on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: The ‘Soul Sisters’ in the Kitchen. Today's Paper|Subscribe